Former Soviet citizens in Wehrmacht or other Third Reich organizations or captivity.

Friday, July 24, 2015

The First Eastern SS Legions Part I

In October 1941, when German victory still seemed certain,
Professor Wolfgang Abel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology Human
Heredity and Genetics led a team of race examiners (Eignungsprüfer) lent by the
SS Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) to occupied Poland to conduct studies of
some of the millions of Soviet POWs held in sprawling, open-air German camps.
It was a journey into hell. Historians now believe that the German army killed
2.8 million prisoners through starvation, gross neglect and execution. This
barely remembered slaughter has been called the Forgotten Holocaust. Historian
Karel Berkhoff argues:

I submit that the
shootings of the Red Army commissars and other Soviet POWs, along with the
starvation of millions more, constituted a single process. It was a process
that started in the middle of 1941 and lasted until at least the end of 1942. I
propose to call it a genocidal massacre. It was a massacre because it was ‘an
instance of killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances
of atrocity or cruelty.’

This genocidal massacre was also a turning point in the
evolution of German racial pseudoscience.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, tens of
thousands of Soviet soldiers surrendered to the Germans. Any identified as Jews
or ‘Bolshevik Commissars’ were immediately executed according to Hitler’s
notorious Commissar Order. They also killed Muslims and ‘Asiatics’ who were
discovered to be circumcised and mistaken for Jews. Completely indiscriminate
killing ended in September, when Nazi officials ordered that North Caucasians,
Armenians and Turkic peoples, as well as Ukrainians and Belorussians, should be
spared. After this spasm of killing, German troops and SS units began marching
the Soviet captives to temporary camps known as ‘Dulag’ and then on to
permanent ‘Stalag’ camps. During these forced marches, prisoners received
minimal rations or none at all; guards often shot dead civilians who tried to
supply food as the pitiful columns of starving, brutalised men passed through
villages and towns. The Germans executed any stragglers who fell behind, even
by a few metres. The survivors finally ended up penned inside an archipelago of
vast, windswept camps enclosed by rudimentary barbed wire fences. Inside this
cruel world, chaos ruled. Or seemed to: German policy was perfectly clear. In
the words of Field Marshall Keitel, the purpose of this murderous internment
was the ‘destruction of a Weltanschauung’ – meaning the Bolshevik world view
that allegedly infested the minds of the prisoners.

According to the ethos of the German camp system, providing
more than a few ladles of watery lentil soup was theft from the German people.
Starvation was camp policy. Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner (who had
negotiated the ‘Einsatzgruppe agreement’ with RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich)
insisted that the prisoners ‘should starve’. Provision of food, according to
Keitel, was ‘wrongheaded humanity’. This German army policy reflected a radical
ministerial strategy that had been formulated by SS-Obergruppenführer Herbert
Backe which assumed that ‘the war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht
is fed from Russia’. As a consequence, ‘there can be no doubt that tens of
millions of people will die of starvation’. One Ukrainian official was told
bluntly: ‘The Führer has decided to exterminate Bolshevism, including the
people spoiled by it.’ Mortality rates varied from camp to camp, but, taken as
a whole, were shockingly high. In some camps, over 2,500 prisoners died every
day. This was the realm of hunger. To live a few days longer, starving,
lice-tormented prisoners would eat anything, including bark. Some resorted,
inevitably, to cannibalism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn provided this account of a
German camp in The Gulag Archipelago: ‘around the bonfires, beings who had once
been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the
bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure
and were all swarming with lice. Not all these two-legged creatures had died as
yet.’ There was just one way out: to be selected for service in the auxiliary
police or for labour service, digging mass graves or rebuilding roads and
bridges in the most gruelling conditions. Few Germans who discovered what was
taking place in the camps protested – with one surprising exception. The German
‘eastern expert’ Alfred Rosenberg sent letter after letter to Keitel
complaining about the murderous treatment of Soviet POWs. He recognised that
Germany was squandering a reservoir of potential good will since many Soviet
minorities hated Stalin. Now they were dying like flies in German camps.
Rosenberg’s appeals fell on deaf ears.

Now in October, the prisoners who remained alive in the
hellish German camps would be preyed on by German scientists led by
anthropologist and SS officer Wolfgang Abel. Although the camp administrators
referred to the prisoners as ‘Russians’, they came from every corner of the
Soviet Empire; for Abel, the gulag was a tainted human treasure trove. The
‘Abel mission’ examined more than 42,000 prisoners from many different ethnic
groups, which included Russians, Turkic peoples, Mongolians and various
Caucasians. Abel’s team measured, photographed and blood tested their subjects.
Then they returned to their spacious offices in Berlin. When they processed
their data, Abel was astonished. Their captive subjects revealed that the
‘Slavic Untermenschen’ of the east exhibited a markedly higher level of
‘Germanic’ characteristics than he and his colleagues had anticipated. The new
findings troubled Abel and other RuSHA race experts. His findings provided
powerful evidence that ‘Asiatic peoples’ had, during periods of German
expansion, been ‘strengthened by Germanic blood’; the colonisers, to put it
another way, had enjoyed sexual congress with the colonised. History, as
geneticist Steve Jones puts it, ‘is made in bed’ – or the wheat field. The
troubling consequence, Abel realised, was a kind of biological theft: German
blood had been stolen from its rightful bearers.

The findings of the Abel mission echoed Himmler’s remarks
about ‘harvesting Germanic blood wherever it might be found’. Now he had
scientific backing. Traditionally many German anthropologists had regarded the
mixing of races or miscegenation as a weakening process. That was certainly the
view of Adolf Hitler. But a number of German race experts came to more nuanced
conclusions. One was Alfred Ploetz, who argued that racial mixing of peoples
‘not too far apart’ was a means of ‘increasing fitness’: he cited the Japanese
as an example. Head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human
Heredity and Eugenics, Professor Eugen Fischer had come to similar conclusions
when he had studied the so-called ‘Rehobother Bastards’. Fischer recommended
that the offspring of unions between Aryans and Jews or Africans should be
compulsorily sterilised. But in cases where the two parents had closer ethnic
bonds, then their offspring might be treated more leniently. This implied that,
as Himmler put it, Germanic blood lines in non-Aryan peoples were a resource
that might be ‘harvested’. When the Abel mission published its conclusions, the
existence of far flung Germanic blood reservoirs had scientific backing. The
time had come to exploit these prized corpuscles. The Abel mission to the
German gulag would soon have a decisive impact on Waffen-SS recruitment
strategy. For Himmler and the SS recruitment experts the question was where to
start.

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.